phaser Labyrimental - experiment with realistic rendering

[Andres]

Hello! This is my first try with an HTML5 game.

It's more like a proof of concept using prerendered images, so it's like 2.5D, not real 3D. There is plenty of room for improvement, but I probably won't do it now (and maybe never) so I thought it would be better to release it as it is.

The gameplay is a bit... unconventional. Audio is a fundamental part of it: walk through a maze being guided by the sounds you hear.

Warning: the screens look better than the game really is, so lower your expectations.

Repository with more info: https://github.com/andresmrm/labyrimental

PLAY!

 

 

[crazyDev]

Nice game. What did you use to make it?

Now if you were to make it fully 3D it would be even better.

[Andres]

42 minutes ago, crazyDev said:

Nice game. What did you use to make it?

Now if you were to make it fully 3D it would be even better.

Thanks. =)

The images are rendered using LuxRender. It's a very powerfull render, but stil too slow for realtime rendering. A single image can take hours to render. For a realtime experience (fully 3D as you said) you'll probably need +30 images rendered per second. There are efforts to make LuxRender faster (using OpenCL/CUDA), but AFAIK it's still too slow for a game. Anyway, you have to install it, you can't run it on the browser.

That's why the images in this game need to be prerended. Each of them took +45min to render (for a total of more than 1 week) and they still could use more time to reduce "granularity".

That said, the scenes I made are quite poor compared to what LuxRender can achieve (look at the image below, more at its galery). But the same technique used for this game could be used to have games with that image quality.

[staff0rd]

I really like this concept - is this similar to how myst/riven worked? (I never played them).

Considering each screen is just an image, it's probably quite possible to do this just using a sound engine, a loader and css.  (Not suggesting you should, just thinking out loud).

[Andres]

8 hours ago, staff0rd said:

I really like this concept - is this similar to how myst/riven worked? (I never played them).

Yes. =)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myst#Production

 

8 hours ago, staff0rd said:

Considering each screen is just an image, it's probably quite possible to do this just using a sound engine, a loader and css.  (Not suggesting you should, just thinking out loud).

You mean without Phaser? Yes, I think so. I used Phaser mostly for I/O, asset loading and some visual effects.